Tumblr & Pinterest: I Say “Obsession,” You Say “Sticky”

As you are likely well aware, I have been obsessed with Pinterest since September. In case you are still unfamiliar with this latest social media craze, Pinterest is an online visual inspiration board. It allows you to collect images (or “pins”) of things and group them into thematically-based “boards.” I use mine primarily to collect inspiration for my food blog, but there are so many beautiful things on there that I have many, many other boards, and have been known to lose chunks of my life scrolling through Pinterest.

I also recently wrote a blog post about Tumblr. While I still haven’t started Tumbling, I do understand Tumblr’s appeal. It sits smack-dab somewhere in between a blog and Twitter. I consider myself to be a writer, so I am going to stick with WordPress, but many people who either don’t consider themselves to be writers, or who find coming up with fresh blogging content daunting, are turning to Tumblr instead, which is a multi-media rich blogging platform that focuses more on photo and video than words.

Both platforms allow you to easily “re-tweet” what others have posted. On Pinterest, it’s called “Repinning,” and on Tumblr, “Reblogging.” This allows you to easily and quickly, with a minimum of effort, share content that you find interesting. Pinterest and Tumblr also play very nicely together.

This week, a very interesting blog post was published about the “stickiness” of Tumblr and Pinterest. When you are looking at your social media success, there are several factors to take into consideration: numbers, certainly, the amount of engagement, and the amount of time people are spending on your site, or stickiness. Turns out, I’m not the only one with a Pinterest obsession: visitors, on average, spent 88 minutes per month on Pinterest, and 141 on Tumblr, only topped by Facebook (394 minutes).

If people are spending that kind of time on Pinterest and Tumblr, should your business be on them? Maybe, if those platforms fit for you.

Who out there is using Pintrest and/or Tumblr for business? I’d love to hear from you.